Orsinian Tales

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “Save myself? For what?” the girl said, without any bitterness. “There never was anybody but him. Even when I was a little kid, before he went into the army. To waste that, that would be a sin…Maybe it was kind of a sin, a little bit, to make that vow, too, mother.”

  Mrs Benat stood up. “Who’s to say?” she asked wearily. “I want to spare my daughter a miserable life, and she tells me it’s a sin.”

  “Not for you, mother. For me. I can’t keep your vows!”

  “Well, God forgive us both, then. And him. I meant it for the best, Lisha.” Mrs Benat went off to her room, walking heavily. Lisha sat on at the table, turning a spoon over and over in her hands. She felt no triumph from having for the first time in her life opposed and defeated her mother. She felt only weariness, and sometimes as she sat tears welled into her eyes again. The only good thing about it all was that there was no longer anyone she feared. At last she went into the room she shared with Eva, found a pencil and a scrap of paper, and wrote a very brief letter to Sanzo Chekey, telling him that she loved him. When it was written she folded it very small, put it in a heavy old gilt-brass locket her mother had given her, and fastened the chain about her neck. Then she went to bed, and lay a long time listening to the endless, aimless blowing of the wind.

  Sara Chekey, as Mrs Benat had said, had no patience. That same night she said to her nephew, while Volf and Albrekt were at the tavern, “Sanzo, you ever think about getting married? Don’t pull a face like that. I’m serious. I thought of it a while back, I’ll tell you why. You should see Lisha Benat’s face when she looks at you. That’s what put it into my head.”

  He turned towards Sara and said coolly, “What business of yours is it how she looks at me?”

  “I’ve got eyes, I can see what’s in front of me!” Then she caught her breath; but Sanzo gave his disquieting laugh. “Go ahead and look, then,” he said. “Only don’t bother to tell me.”

  “Listen, Sanzo Chekey, there you stand in your pride acting like nothing on earth made any difference to you, and never think that what I’m saying might have some sense in it you might listen to. What good do you think I’d get out of your marrying? I was just thinking of you and happened to notice—”

  “Drop it,” he said. His voice had broken into the strained, arrogant note that exasperated Sara. She turned on him with a rush of justifications and accusations.

  “That’s done it,” Sanzo broke in. “I’ll never see that girl again.” There being nowhere else to get away from Sara, he went out, slamming the door behind him. He ran down the stairs. Out on the street, without his stick, his coat, or any money, he stopped, and stood there. Lisha wanted to get him, did she? and Sara wanted him got? And they had laid their little plans, and he had fallen for it!—When the awful tension of humiliation and rage began to subside, he had lost his bearings and did not know which direction he was facing, whether he had moved away from the doorway or not. He had to grope around for several minutes to locate himself. People passed by, talking; they paid no attention to him, or thought he was drunk. At last he found the entrance, went back upstairs, took ten kroner from his father’s little cashbox, brushed past the protesting Sara, and slammed the door a second time.

  He came back about ten the next morning, flopped down on his hallway bed, and slept all day. It was Sunday, and his uncle, having to pass the sprawled figure several times, finally said to Sara, “Why’d he go bust out again? Took all his money, Volf says. He ain’t bust out like that all summer. Like he used to when he first got home.”

  “Yes, drinking up the money that’s to support him and his father, that’s all he’s good for.”

  Albrekt scratched his head and as usual answered slowly and not exactly to the point. “Seems like a hell of a life for a fellow only twenty-six,” he said.

  The next day at four Lisha came to the apartment. He proposed that they walk out; they went up onto the Hill, to the garden. It was October now, an overcast day getting ready to rain. Neither of them spoke as they walked. They sat down on the grass below the empty house. Lisha shivered, looking out over the grey city, its thousand streets, its huge factories. Without sunlight, the garden was dominated by the forbidding dark bulk of the chestnut grove. A train whistled across town far away.

  “What’s it look like?”

  “All grey and black.”

  She heard the childish whispering note in her own voice. But it had not cost his pride to ask the question of her. That was good, that lightened her heart a little. If they could only go on talking, or if he would touch her, so that for him she would be there, then it would be all right. Soon he did reach out to her, and willingly she put herself entirely inside the hold of his arm, resting her cheek against his shoulder. She felt a tension in him as if he had something he wanted to say, and she was about to ask him what it was, when he lifted her face with his hand and kissed her. The kiss grew insistent. He turned so that his weight was on her and pushed her back, the pressure of his mouth sliding down to her throat and to her breasts. She tried to speak and could not, tried to push him away and could not. His weight pushed her down, his shoulder blocked out the sky. Her stomach contracted in a knot, she could not see, but she managed to gasp out, “Let me go,” a weak thin whisper. He paid no heed; he crushed her down into the stiff grass and the darkness of the earth, with such strength that she felt only weakness, weakness as if she were dying. But when he tried to force her legs apart with his hand it hurt, so sharply that she began to struggle again, to fight like an animal. She got one arm free, pushed his head away, and writhed out from under him in one convulsive movement. She got to all fours, staggered to her feet, and ran.

  Sanzo lay there, his face half buried in the grass.

  When she came back to him he had not moved. Her tears, which she had managed to control, started again as she stood by him.

  “Come on, get up, Sanzo,” she said softly.

  He lay still.

  “Come on.”

  After a while he twisted round and sat up. His white face was scored with the crisscross marks of the stiff grass, and his eyes when he opened them looked to the side, as if staring across to the grove of chestnuts.

  “Let’s go home, Sanzo,” she whispered to his terrible face. He drew back his lips and said, “Get away. Let me alone.”

  “I want to go home.”

  “Then go! Go on, do you think I need you? Go on, get out!” He tried to push her away, only striking her knee. Lisha went, and waited for him at the side of the drive outside the garden. When he passed her she held her breath, and when he was a good way past her she began to follow him, trying to walk soundlessly. The rain had started, thin drops slanting from a low, quiet sky.

  Sanzo did not have his stick. He strode along boldly at first, as he did when he walked with her, but then began to slow down, evidently losing his nerve. He got along all right for a while, and once she heard him whistling his jig-tune through his teeth. Once off the Hill, in the noisier streets where he could not hear echoes, he began to hesitate, lost his bearings and took a wrong turn. Lisha followed close behind him. People stared at both of them. He stopped short at last, and she heard him ask of no one, “Is this Bargay Street?”

  A man approaching him stared at him and then answered, “No, you’re way off.” He took Sanzo’s arm and headed him back the right way, with directions, and questions about was he blind, was it a mill accident or the war. Sanzo went off, but before he had gone a block he stopped again and stood there. Lisha caught up with him and took his arm in silence. He was breathing very hard, like an exhausted runner.

  “Lisha?”

  “Yes. Come on.”

  But at first he could not move at all, could not take a step.

  They went on, slowly, though the rain was getting thicker. When they reached their building he put out his hand to the entranceway, touching the bricks; with that as reassurance he turned to her and said, “Don’t come again.”

  “Good night, Sanzo,” she said
.

  “It’s no good, see,” he said, and at once started up the stairs. She went on to her entrance.

  For several days he went to the furniture store in the afternoon and stayed there late, not coming home till dinner time. Then there was no caning or repairing to be done for a while, and he took to going to the park in the late afternoon. He kept this up after the winter east wind had begun to blow, bringing the rain, the sleet, the thin, damp, dirty snow. When he stayed in the apartment all day, a nervous boredom would grow and grow in him; his hands shook and he lost the sensitivity of his touch, could not tell what he was handling, whether he was handling anything at all. This drove him out, and out longer, until he brought back a headache and a cough. Fever wrung him and rattled him for a week, and left him prey to more coughs and fevers every time he went out.

  The weakness, the stupidity of ill health were a relief to him. But it was hard on Sara. She had to leave breakfast ready for him and Volf now, and pay for patent medicines for his headache which sometimes made him cry out in pain, and be waked at night by his coughing. She had never done anything but work hard, and could have compensated herself by nagging and complaining; but it wasn’t the work, it was his presence, his always being there, intent, listless, blind, doing nothing, saying nothing. That exasperated her till she would shout at poor Albrekt as they walked to the shop, “I can’t stand it, I can’t stay in that house with him!”

  But the only one who escaped that winter was old Volf. A few nights before Christmas he went out with the ten kroner Sara gave him back monthly from his pension, came back with his bottle, and climbed up three of the four flights of stairs but not the fourth. Heart failure laid him down on the stair-landing, where he was found an hour later. Laid in his coffin he looked a bigger man, and his face in death, intent, unseeing, was a darker version of his son’s face. All old friends and neighbors came to the funeral, for which the Chekeys went into debt. The Benats were there, but Sanzo did not hear Lisha’s voice.

  Sanzo moved out of the hall into the windowless bedroom that had been his father’s, and things went on as before, a little easier on Sara.

  In January one of Eva’s young men, a dyer at the Ferman mill, perhaps discouraged by the competition for Eva, began looking around and saw Lisha. If she saw him it was without fear and without interest; but when he asked her to walk out with him she agreed. She was as quiet and amenable as she had always been, there was no change in her, except that she and her mother were closer friends than they had been, talking together as equals, working together as partners. Her mother certainly saw the young man, but she said nothing about him to Lisha, nor did Lisha say anything except, occasionally, “I’ll be walking out with Givan after supper.”

  Across one night of March the wind from the frozen eastern plains dropped and a humid wind rose up from the south. The rain turned warm and large. In the morning weeds were pushing up between the stones of the courtyard, the city’s fountains ran full and noisy, voices carried further down the streets, the sky was dotted with small bluish clouds. That night Lisha and Givan followed one of the Rákava lovers’ walks, out through the East Gate to the ruins of a guard tower; and there in the cold and starlight he asked her to marry him. She looked out to the great falling darkness of the Hill and plains, and back to the lights of the city half hidden by the broken outer wall. It took her a long time to answer. “I can’t,” she said.

  “Why not, Lisha?”

  She shook her head.

  “You were in love with somebody, he went off, or he’s already married, or something went wrong with it like that. I know that. I asked you knowing it.”

  “Why?” she said with anguish. He answered directly: “Because it’s over, and it’s my time now.”

  That shook her, and sensing it, he said, with sudden humbleness, “Think about it.”

  “I will. But—”

  “Just think about it. It’s the right thing to do, Lisha. I’m the one for you. And I’m not the kind that changes my mind.”

  That made her smile a little, because of Eva, but also because it was true. He was a shy, determined, holdfast fellow. What if I did? she thought, and at once felt herself become humble with his humility, protected, certain, safe.

  “It’s not fair to ask me now,” she said with a flash of anger, so that he insisted no more than to ask her, as they parted at her entrance, to think about it. She said she would. And she did.

  It was how long, five months now, since the day in the wild garden on the Hill; and she still woke in the night from a dream that the stiff dry grass of autumn was pushing against her back and she could not move or speak or see. Then as she woke from the dream she would see the sky suddenly, and rain falling straight from it on her. It was of that she had to think, only that.

  She saw Sanzo oftener now that it was sunny. She always spoke to him. He would be sitting in the yard near the pump sometimes, as his father had used to do. When she came for water for the washing and pressing, she would greet him: “Afternoon, Sanzo.”

  “That you, Lisha?”

  His skin was white and dull, and his hands looked too large on his wrists.

  One day in early April she was ironing alone down in the cellar room which her mother rented as a laundry. Light came in through small windows set high in the wall, at ground level; sparse grass and weeds stirred in the sunlight just outside the dusty glass. A streak of sunshine fell across the shirt she was pressing, and the steam rose, smelling sharp of ozone. She began to sing aloud.

  Two tattered beggars met on the street.

  ‘Hey, little brother, give me bread to eat!’

  ‘Go to the baker’s house, ask him for the key,

  If he won’t hand it over, say you were sent by me!’

  She had to go out for water for the sprinkling-bottle. After the dusk of the cellar, the sunlight filled her eyes with whorls and blots of black and gold. Still humming, she went to the pump.

  Sanzo had just come out of the house. “Morning, Lisha.”

  “Morning, Sanzo.”

  He sat down on the bench, stretching out his long legs, raising his face to the sun. She stood silent by the pump and looked at him. She looked at him intently, judgingly.

  “You still there?”

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  “I never see you any more.”

  She took this in silence. Presently she came and sat down beside him, setting the jug of water down carefully under the bench. “Have you been feeling better?”

  “Guess so.”

  “The sun, it’s like we could all get out and live again. It’s really spring now. Smell this.” She picked the small white flower of a weed that had come up between the flagstones near the pump, and put it in his hand. “It’s too little to feel it. Smell it. It smells like pancakes.”

  He dropped the flower and bowed his head as if looking down at it. “What have you been up to lately? Besides the laundry?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Eva’s getting married, next month. To Ventse Estay. They’re going to move to Brailava, up north. He’s a bricklayer, there’s work up there.”

  “And how about you?”

  “Oh, I’m staying here,” she said, and then feeling the dull, cold condescension of his tone added, “I’m engaged.”

  “Who to?”

  “Givan Fenne.”

  “What’s he do?”

  “Dyer at Ferman. He’s secretary of the Union section.”

  Sanzo got up, strode across the yard to the archway, then turned and more hesitantly came back. He stood there a couple of yards from her, his hands hanging at his sides; he was not quite facing her. “Good for you, congratulations!” he said, and turned to go.

  “Sanzo!”

  He stopped and waited.

  “Stay here a minute.”

  “What for?”

  “Because I want you to.”

  He stood still.

  “I wanted to tell you…” But she got stuck.

  He came back, felt
for the bench, and sat down. “Look, Lisha,” he said in a cooler voice, “it doesn’t make any difference.”

  “Yes it does, it makes a lot. I wanted to tell you that I’m not engaged. He did ask me, but I’m not.”

  He was listening, but without expression. “Then why’d you say you were?”

  “I don’t know. To make you mad.”

  “And so?”

  “And so,” said Lisha. “And so, I wanted to tell you that you may be blind but that’s no excuse for being deaf, dumb, and stupid. I know you were sick and I’m very sorry, but you’d be sicker if I had anything to do with it.”

  Sanzo sat motionless. “What the hell?” he said. She did not answer; and after quite a while he turned, his hand reaching out and then stopping in mid-gesture, and said nervously, “Lisha?”

  “I’m right here.”

  “Thought you’d gone.”

  “I’m not done yet.”

  “Well, go ahead. Nobody’s stopping you.”

  “You are.”

  A pause.

  “Look, Lisha, I have to. Don’t you see that?”

  “No, I don’t. Sanzo, let me explain—”

  “No. Don’t. I’m not a stone wall, Lisha.”

  They sat side by side in the warmth a while.

  “You’d better marry that fellow.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Don’t be a fool.”

  “I can’t get around it. Around you.”

  He turned his face away. In a strained, stifled voice he said, “I wanted to apologise—” He made a vague gesture.

  “No! Don’t.”

  There was a silence again. Sanzo sat up straighter and rubbed his hands over his eyes and forehead, painfully. “Look, Lisha, it’s no good. Honestly. There’s your parents, what are they going to say, but that’s not it, it’s all the rest of it, living with my aunt and uncle, I can’t…A man has to have something to offer.”

  “Don’t be humble.”

  “I’m not. I never have been. I know what I am and this—this business doesn’t make any difference to that, to me. But it does, it would to somebody else.”